US post-war plan: Old soldiers never die, writes Deaglan de Breadun and, in the case of Lt-Gen Jay Garner, they don't even fade away. The retired three-star general has exchanged a quiet life in the plush suburbs of Orlando, Florida, to become the George Bush-anointed civilian administrator of post-Saddam Iraq.
Although he has not yet made a proper public debut, his critics are growing by the day. As an American military man with ties to the defence industry and Israel, his appointment has not gone down well with the Arab world. The anti-war, now "anti-occupation", movement is so hostile to him that they have even set up a website called www.stopjaygarner.com and some would-be political leaders of the new Iraq have begun to question his role already.
Garner is a friend of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tends not to consort with soft-jawed liberals, but as one observer at US Central Command in Doha put it: "Anyone the Bush administration appoints is going to be right-wing."
The general won a grudging respect outside his own political circles for his performance in the aftermath of the last Gulf War. That was when the Kurds foolishly heeded the urgings of George Bush snr to rise up against Saddam.
When the rebellion started going wrong, nobody came to their aid. They fled in their hundreds of thousands to Turkey and Iran, starving, freezing and dying, as the present writer witnessed at first hand. Garner was appointed to oversee their return to northern Iraq and his handling of the humanitarian relief and resettlement effort, known as Operation Provide Comfort, was generally praised.
Difficult as that task was, his latest assignment will be a lot more tricky. There is no need this time to transport masses of people back to their homes over rough mountain terrain, but Iraq after Saddam is a minefield in both the literal and political sense.
In January this year, Lt-Gen Garner was named head of the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, reporting to the chief military commander, Gen Tommy Franks. For about a month now, he has been based at the Hilton Resort Hotel in Kuwait along with scores of fellow-Americans from the military, diplomatic and aid sectors, planning the transition to the new Iraq.
Initially, the group is scheduled to take over many government functions for this country of 23 million people which has been ravaged by war, dictatorship and the impact of UN sanctions.
Some anti-Saddam Iraqis have questioned the need for this transitional group. They want Iraqis to govern Iraqis and claim that the Garner group is spearheading an American occupation. These questions would doubtless have been put to the notoriously media-shy Garner at a press conference scheduled for Kuwait last Monday, but it was cancelled without explanation.
It is reported that Garner commanded Patriot anti-missile batteries in Israel during the first Gulf War - with mixed results. After his retirement from the US army in 1997, he accepted an invitation from the conservative Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs to visit Israel. In October 2000, along with 42 other recently-retired officers, he signed an institute statement praising the Israeli security forces for their "remarkable restraint" in dealing with the Palestinian uprising.
In the long-established tradition of close links between the US military and the defence industry, at the end of his 38-year US army career Garner became president of SY Tech Inc (now SYColeman Corp), a missile defence firm which has secured many millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. He is currently on unpaid leave from the job.
Now he is to take over responsibility for everything from pumping Iraqi oil to ensuring power supplies, distributing humanitarian aid and removing traces of Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi system of government.
Mr Tony Blair and other European leaders have been urging a role for the United Nations, but while the UN will inevitably be involved at some level, at the moment it looks very much like Garner's show.
His first move will reportedly be to divide the country into three regions, each with its own American supremo. He will have three other senior assistants - for reconstruction, civil administration and humanitarian aid. He is also expected to set up an advisory council of Iraqis, both dissidents returning from exile and local figures untainted by support for Saddam.
How quickly native Iraqis are to be brought into full administrative and governmental roles is not entirely clear, especially since the military conflict is still not completely finished and some fairly deep pockets of resistance remain. Garner's role is described as preparing the ground for an interim Iraqi authority to take over many administrative functions.
Jay Garner will be 65 on Tuesday, an age when some of us might think of cultivating our gardens. If Iraq was a garden, it would be full of thorns, weeds and fiercely-threatening undergrowth. The coalition has held out a vision of a future Iraq which would be a well-manicured model for the rest of the Middle East. Left-wingers and peace activists say that the American "hyperpower" is interested only in Iraq's massive oil reserves.
Past experience suggests that the general will tackle the immediate humanitarian problems with some success, but he is unlikely to facilitate the creation of the type of new Iraq which would offend the susceptibilities of either George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. One way or the other, we are going to hear a lot of Jay Garner in the months ahead.